1. Statement of the Technical Field
The present invention relates to the field of electronic commerce (e-commerce) data processing systems and more particularly to a cooperative electronic business (e-business) complex.
2. Description of the Related Art
The advent and refinement of the Internet and more particularly, the World Wide Web (the “Web”), has provided a unique foundation upon which on-line commerce opportunities have rapidly developed. At the time of the popularization of the Web, conventional business-to-consumer and consumer-to-consumer firms recognized the ease in which potential customers could access data and conduct transactions over the Internet. As a result, such firms developed sophisticated electronic virtual store fronts through which commerce could be conducted either as a substitute for or an enhancement to more conventional “brick and mortar” operations.
In a virtual store, as in a conventional store, images and descriptions products are presented to potential customers, albeit electronically, in consequence of which the potential customers can select individual products for purchase. In order to consummate a purchase transaction, the virtual store can collect payment information from the customer and can confirm payment with a third party credit provider as is well known in the art. Still, as analogously recognized in the conventional retail industry, operating an individual virtual store can prove difficult inasmuch as the infrastructure necessary to support the virtual store can be complex and expensive to acquire and maintain. In particular, marketing, payment processing, inventory management, vendor relationship management and distribution often can inhibit one's entrance into the retail sector.
In the conventional retail environment, individual store owners have been able to overcome the infrastructure obstacle through cooperative measures. Specifically, for decades individual store owners have banded together in shopping malls through which at least a portion of the infrastructure can be provided and managed for the benefit of all stores housed therein. In the shopping mall environment, retail elements such as marketing and store space maintenance are collectively shared by all stores in the mall. Notably, similar attempts at collective sharing of retail infrastructure are reflected in cooperative business processing systems such as the online “virtual mall”.
In the virtual mall, shoppers can access associated virtual stores through a common point of entry such as a Web portal. Initially, virtual malls were limited to industry specific virtual stores carrying industry specific products such as travel-related products. In many cases, virtual malls bypassed the virtual store entirely and merely presented the products of each individual virtual store in the virtual mall in the absence of the virtual store. In this regard, many would argue that the virtual mall itself became the virtual store.
More recently, however, virtual malls have expanded to include a wide variety of products offered through actual virtual stores. Still, conventional virtual malls simply behave as front-end portals for associated virtual stores. All infrastructure necessary to operate each virtual store must be managed by each respective virtual store, save for some common marketing efforts set forth by the virtual mall itself. FIG. 1 is a pictorial representation of a conventional virtual store arrangement which can be linked to a conventional virtual mall. In particular, the virtual store arrangement of FIG. 1 can be an implementation of the Websphere®) Commerce Suite for Service Providers® manufactured by International Business Machines Corporation of Armonk, N.Y., USA.
In the conventional virtual store arrangement of FIG. 1, shoppers 102 can access the virtual store 104 over the Internet 110. The virtual store 104 can include a commerce server 114 and an application server 112. The commerce server 114 in conjunction with a conventional database server 108 can provide front-end processing for the shoppers 102 and can include runtime shopping services, a merchandise subsystem, an ordering subsystem, a user subsystem and security services. Back-end business logic can be performed in the application server and can include “hard-wired” links to external systems 106 such as ERP/legacy systems, payment processing systems, market intelligence systems and other partner systems.
In a conventional virtual mall arrangement, each virtual store 104 can be linked together in a virtual mall as suggested in FIGS. 20 and 21 of U.S. Pat. No. 5,890,137 to Koreeda for ON-LINE SHOPPING SYSTEM AND THE METHOD OF PAYMENT SETTLEMENT. Yet, the loose association of many virtual stores in a virtual mall fails to capitalize even upon the collective efficiencies normally associated with a conventional shopping mall. In particular, in the conventional virtual mall, individual virtual stores still must maintain their own e-commerce infrastructure including the maintenance of buyer and seller networks, system administration and maintenance, external payment processing services, shipping logistics, market analysis, storefront development and other partner services. In fact, in the conventional virtual mall, even marketing remains a task whose responsibility belongs to each virtual store.
Notably, the conduct of commerce on the Internet has grown from the operation of simplistic virtual malls to the use of the Internet as an e-business platform for conducting business-to-business, e-commerce and e-marketplace transactions among parties associated with differing network and system infrastructures. Participants in these electronic exchanges require fast and simple mechanisms through which applications in each exchange can communicate. To address the needs of e-business, “Web services” technology has become a rapidly-emerging mechanism for distributed application integration.
Web services are known in the art to include a stack of emerging standards that describe a service-oriented, component-based application architecture. Specifically, Web services are loosely coupled, reusable software components that semantically encapsulate discrete functionality and are distributed and programmatically accessible over standard Internet protocols. Conceptually, Web services represent a model in which discrete tasks within e-business processes are distributed widely throughout a value net. Notably, many industry experts consider the service-oriented Web services initiative to be the next evolutionary phase of the Internet.